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Spirit FM asks author SN Weddle how he came to write his debut CHICK LIT novel!

1st August 2014

1. It starts with a kiss is your first novel. What were you doing prior to writing?

I trained as a journalist with the Birmingham Post and Mail, and during my time there I acted as Editor of the Women’s Page whenever Diana - who was usually in charge - took a break. Perhaps that was where my interest in all things female started!

I later transferred to television, working on a number of daytime shows, first as a researcher, until I graduated as a Producer of mainly lifestyle and magazine output, including Pebble Mill at One, the forerunner of today’s One Show. I also co-devised the original TV make-over show, Style Challenge, when many of Britain’s top hairdressers, make-up artists and fashion experts raced against the clock to give members of the public a fabulous new look.

2. Did your work give you an insight into how women feel about issues of age, image and beauty?

I first noticed how many of the women being made over on the show admitted to being stuck in a rut about the way they looked, which in some way also mirrored how they felt about the rest of their lives. It soon became apparent to me that while the creation of a new look can never be the answer to life’s problems, it can provide a spring board to a better future, judging by the letters we received from contestants. They often wrote of finding new friends, getting better jobs or even landing a new man after being re-invented on the Show! And often some of the best make-overs were of more mature women, who had seemed to have forgotten how fabulous they really were. I think the media’s obsession with youth is much to blame, and nobody suffers more than women in the way they are overlooked beyond a certain age. And that’s wrong, and downright wasteful.

3. How did you come to write from a female perspective?

I originally wanted to write a novel about having a mid life crisis, and people reinventing themselves, but when I looked around me I couldn’t help but notice how it was mainly my female friends who were running off and doing amazing things like creating businesses, learning foreign languages or attending dance classes where they would sometimes salsa with toy boys - and sometimes more! And this seemed all the more remarkable to me as weren’t women of a certain age supposed to become invisible whereas men were thought of as getting more handsome and more influential as they grew older? And given older women have to battle against so much prejudice it seemed to me that it would be far more interesting if the lead character of my book was female.

However I did write my first version of the story in the third person, with me as the unseen narrator observing the adventures of my female protagonist, Jennifer, from afar. Unsure whether it was good enough, I sent the manuscript to a literary agency called Cornerstones, who for a fee, analyse your story, pointing out its strengths and weaknesses. Among the various observations and suggestions this particular female Reader suggested was that I should write the story in the first person instead. In other words, I had to become Jennifer! Now although I’d been Editor of the Women’s Page in the Birmingham Sunday Mercury for a couple of weeks, I really wasn’t sure that qualified me to write as a woman, but I took her advice, and the rest is history.

4. In the book, the protagonist gets to turn back the clock and become her younger self. Based on appearance, do you think older women get a raw deal in life?

Yes, yes and yes again. Why is it that a man is described as being more distinguished as he grows older whereas there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent word for a maturing woman. Femininity has always been much more associated with youth than masculinity in the popular consciousness. You’ve only got to the look at the tabloids. Yet take a look at Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra – “age cannot wither her” – she’s much sexier and smarter than Juliet in Romeo and Juliet could ever be. Unfortunately older women seem to disappear from our screens after a certain age, so what does that say to the rest of society? However, it’s beginning to change – in popular culture we’ve had the Yummy Mummy’s and the Cougars, and then there’s Helen Mirren, who’s not only sexy but incredibly bright and funny.

5. How long did it take you to write the book – did you write daily?

Too long! I first had the broad outline of the idea nearly ten years ago, but I didn’t really start writing properly until about five years later. And during those five years I wrote five different drafts until I hit on what I thought was the right ending, which had been troubling me ever since I started the project. I didn’t want it to be one of those books where you have to plough through a whole bunch of events and then finish up no wiser than when you started. And then it came to me, but that has to remain secret.

And I tried to write daily, but more often than not reality would intervene. Just as my protagonist, Jennifer was about to step out of her limo for the New York premiere of Ravishing a bloke would turn up at my front door to read the gas metre, and I would be back in suburban Sutton Coldfield again, giving me the excuse to do something else, anything apart from writing.

6. What do you hope that people will take from your book?

Above everything, I hope people will be entertained. It’s been described as being a romp of a novel, and is meant to be sexy and fun – and hopefully funny too. But it does have its serious side, so I would love readers to be inspired to believe -in the words of another, slightly more famous Warwickshire author, George Eliot - that, “It’s Never Too Late To Be Who You Might Have Been.”

Published on 16 June, It Starts With a Kiss is available from Amazon, via Memoirs/Mereo Books (www.mereobooks.com) and from all good book stores.